The Pseudoscience Investigation
by FringifiedWhovian
Summary: When Sheldon opens a wormhole in an attempt to finally prove string theory, Pasadena authorities call in the Fringe Team. Includes the basic five from BBT and 'Our' Fringe team. Peter/Olivia after Marionette. Slight Leonard/Penny, I guess...
1. Ladies Night

**A/N: This chapter serves as a sort of cold opening. It doesn't really deal with any emotional dilemmas. The Fringe team doesn't show up until the second chapter. Also, I'm not particularly adept at writing either of these fandoms, but here goes:**

**I don't own Big Bang Theory or Fringe. :P **

**Thanks to WeBuiltThePyramids for Beta-Reading!  
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><p>Upon exiting his room, prepared to finally head to that bar they had been talking about attending for months, Leonard Hofstadter was met with the persistent figure of Sheldon Cooper. His praying mantis of a roommate had moved their collection of whiteboards to the open space near his desk, arranging them in a sort of tri-fold setting. Sheldon had apparently seen it fit to erase Leonard's board, which had been covered with his own work.<p>

"What are you doing, Sheldon?" He was almost afraid to hear the answer.

"I've decided to prove string theory, tonight."

"You can't _actually_ do that…"

"Can't I? It's Anything-Can-Happen Thursday. Is there a better day to do something deemed impossible by the general public?" There was a knock at the door.

"No. I guess not…" Leonard muttered as he moved to answer it. Howard Wolowitz sauntered into the apartment, followed promptly by Rajesh Koothrappali.

"The PARTY has arrived!" Howard declared, throwing his hands in the air.

Raj followed, after scoping the room for possible female inhabitants, "Are you ready for LADIES NIGHT?"

"After months of planning, we are ready to enter the great unknown!"

"Hang on, Howard… our plans may be disrupted, again…"

"What?"

"Sheldon claims he's going to prove string theory tonight…" Leonard's doubtful grin showed just how amusing he found the situation.

"No, I _am_ going to prove string theory. By emitting the proper frequency on a high enough scale, I'm going to shake the strings of the universe."

"That's just common sense, Sheldon, but it's impossible to **do**!"

"I've devised some possible apparatuses. Although I _suppose_ I'll need you all to have a look at them… I sent you all descriptions as attachments in the weekly memo." Leonard shrugged and went to his Laptop to pull up the email. While they were waiting, Howard spoke.

"I'm surprised you would send something like that out in an email, Sheldon."

"I wrote them in code. What do you thing I am, Howard? An imbecile?"

"Oh! Here it is!" Leonard opened the file on his computer. Howard and Raj grouped behind him and began to read over his shoulder.

"Is this Klingon backwards?" Raj questioned.

"Yes… code." Sheldon was growing annoyed, "You don't need to keep restating the obvious."

"Wait… this one might work…" Howard interrupted, pointing over Leonard's shoulder at the laptop screen.

"With some slight additions here," Leonard indicated an object onscreen, " And here…"

"We already _know_ all this… Can't we just get started?"

*Several hours of tinkering later*

Penny was sitting on her couch, only vaguely paying attention to whatever late-night rerun was on, when the screen suddenly cut to loud static.

"COME ON! I just paid the cable bill yesterday!" She exclaimed, quickly reaching for the remote in order to turn down the volume. Once the static died, however, an earsplitting screech emitted from the hallway, forcing her to throw her hands to her head. Doubled over from pain, she stumbled over to the phone. Coincidentally, the cacophony ceased when she reached it. Tentatively, she released her ears and dialed 911.

"Hello? This is Penny from apartment 4B at 2311 N. Los Robles Avenue. Yeah, well my cable just cut out and – I KNOW that's not a reason to call 911, _now_, that's not it! There was this really loud high pitched noi- OMIGOSH!" The room around her began shaking, as if it were being yanked to the side. Havoc was wreaked in her apartment: furniture slowly inched across the floor, dishes slid off the tables and pictures fell from the wall. Penny nearly lost her balance herself, and quickly ran to stand in a doorway. She screamed, still holding the phone to her mouth. "Oh, sorry," she apologized to the attendant. "Yeah, I think there's an earthquake! What do you mean there isn't? Well my entire apartment is shaking! Hello? Hello?"

Penny threw to phone across the room, but it was grabbed by whatever force was moving the rest of her belongings and flew against her door. Curiously, she crawled over her belongings. When she opened the door, her things started flowing onto the hallway and toward the apartment across the hall. "This is one of their experiments… I'm gonna kill 'em!" Her hair flew around her head in similar fashion to her things, and when she turned the knob of Sheldon and Leonard's apartment, the door swung open violently and she was pulled in by the force. Once inside she gasped at what she saw. Leonard, Sheldon, Howard, and Raj were behind the island in kitchenette, gripping the edge to avoid being pulled onto the vortex on their coffee table.

Penny turned and grabbed the doorframe. "What the heck is going on!

"I proved String Theory!" Sheldon called over the ruckus.

Leonard, Howard, and Raj glared at him, appalled. "_You_ proved it?"

"Yes, it was my idea, and primarily my design!"

"Guys!" Penny interjected, "This isn't the time!" Suddenly, the sound of footsteps echoed up from the stairwell.

"You called the cops, Penny?"

"Well, yeah… I didn't know what was going on!"

"Everyone FREEZE!" The cops called.

Penny turned around to face them. "A drugs bust? _Really_?"

The officer's jaws hung open when they looked around. "I think this is out of our jurisdiction…"

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><p><strong>I hope you liked it<strong>!

**Please rate and review.**


	2. The Machine, Um, Device

**A/N: This chapter had to be done... also, the Fringe part hasn't been beta'd, but I couldn't wait to update any longer.  
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**Sadly, I don't own Fringe or the Big Bang Theory, and I honestly wouldn't know what to do with myself if I did. **

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><p>Olivia and Astrid were already in the lab when Peter and Walter arrived with breakfast.<p>

"We're here!" Peter called, unpacking his and Olivia's coffee. "You're here awfully early…" He gave her the coffee how _she_ liked it – black. He wouldn't make that mistake again.

"Yeah, I couldn't sleep, so I decided to go ahead and finish up the paperwork from our last case."

Peter feigned a grimace. "Yeah, that was a creepy one." These crazy happenings were beginning to become the norm for him, but he kept up thee rituals of bewilderment anyway, in attempt to prolong the existence of his humanity.

"They always are…" They shared a knowing - if slightly gloomy - smile. From across the laboratory, Walter's strange request rang out.

"Astro, do we have any gelatin?"

"No, Walter, _why_ would we need gelatin?"

"To make pudding, of course! I also need bacon…" Walter continued his list, but his voice declined to a murmur.

"Ah, the bacon-flavored pudding, again." Immediately after speaking, Peter realized that Walter's first reference to the concoction had been in the presence of Fauxlivia and regretted speaking at all. The simultaneous ringing of their cell phones rescued him form the awkward situation.

"Dunham"

"Peter Bishop"

"Agent Farnsworth"

"A new case?"

"Pasadena?"

"On the way…" They ended their respective calls and Astrid left to draw Walter from his thoughts on low-calorie, meat-flavored deserts.

"Looks like we get a free trip to California." Peter announced, his signature smirk lit his face and he noticed Olivia grinning, too. He was glad they'd become friendly with one another again, his life had become a guilt-ridden hell when she was avoiding him.

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><p>When the Fringe team arrived on the scene, the Officer in Charge met them at the door of the apartment building.<p>

"Is that a drug team?" Walter asked her, looking slightly alarmed.

"Um, yes. Based on the call to the authorities, we first assumed it was merely a stoned teenager, and deployed the drug squad."

"Oh, how disappointing…"

Olivia cleared her throat; she didn't need her scientist getting himself arrested. "Yes, well, can you point us to the site of the incident?"

"Right this way." She led them inside and indicated the stairwell. "The elevator's Out-of-Order. Its apartment 4A."

"You've got to be kidding me." Astrid complained. Peter nodded his agreement as the group began to climb the steps.

When they had reached the second landing, Peter struck up a conversation. "Did Broyles tell you what we're here to see?"

"No, just that it was urgent. I think its safe to assume it has something to do with the Other Side." That dreadful place, they were almost always behind the Fringe Events.

"Mhmm…" Peter's reply was minimal, but she wasn't surprised that he didn't want to get involved in a conversation about _them_. She didn't blame Peter for being from there, he couldn't help that. She blamed him for not seeing _her_ for who she was: for not recognizing that Fauxlivia wasn't the same as her.

"Do you feel that buzzing?" Olivia asked as they approached the third floor. She could feel it. The floor shook slightly, and there was a ringing in her ears. It reminded her of how she'd felt before Walternate had crossed over to their side on the bridge. That was the beginning of this mess.

Her coworkers shook their heads then, but by the time they'd reached the fourth floor, it was impossible to deny. Peter shook his head -to clear his ears, or out of remembrance of the same incident?- and entered 4A in the lead. He halted abruptly as soon as he was inside.

Four men, perhaps a little younger than Peter and her, and all quite geeky looking, to be blunt, stood behind the island in the kitchenette on the far side of the room. A pretty, blonde girl stood there with them as well as a police officer who seemed extremely nervous. Peter wasn't staring at the people, though, although she was sure the frightened police officer would've made him smirk. Olivia began to smile herself, but then remembered the betrayal - his overlooking her absence and replacement.

Instead of the people, his gaze was focused on a large rectangular frame, about the dimensions of a doorframe cut in half horizontally, sitting on the coffee table. Inside the frame a swirling black wormhole extended into oblivion. Not uppercase Oblivion, nothing that dire - just oblivion. "This is definitely what Broyles called us in for; it's right up our alley..."

"What do you mean 'right up your alley'?" A lanky young man with a disproportionately large head piped up from behind the counter. "This work is completely original! It was strictly theoretical until mere hours ago!"

Peter's knowing grin preceded his snide comment. "Sure it was…"

"This closely resembles my device from umm…" Walter glanced back at Peter, "The 1980's."

"What do you _mean_ 'your device'?" Lanky-Boy was growing increasingly aggravated. "This is my-" One of his friends, a shorter man with thick, black-framed glasses and a greenish hoodie, elbowed him. "I mean _our_ work!"

"Forget your pride, Sheldon!" This was a third guy. He had a bowl-cut and prominent nose. The fluorescent colors of his shirt were obnoxious, but not nearly as awful as his heinously tight skinny jeans of a matching shade, revealed as he stepped from behind the counter. "The government has just admitted to hiding technology from civilians!"

"Well, that's hardly anything new…" Walter commented loudly, although it appeared he had intended discretion.

"Sorry, man" Peter added. "We don't work for the government." He pulled out the name badge he used to get into the FBI building. "Civilian consultant."

Olivia changed the subject before anything could get worse. It seemed she was doing a lot of that today. "Listen, we need to get statements from all of you. We have to determine what this is and what kind of damage this device has caused or could cause in the future. So if you five could come out into the hallway- " the lanky one, Sheldon, seemed about to interrupt again, but Olivia silenced him. " Dr. Bishop and Agent Farnsworth" she indicated the two, "are perfectly competent to manage your machine… device." This doorframe wasn't the Machine. That thing was set up in Massive Dynamic. Somehow, she and Peter were both connected to it. As Olivia led the five people from the room, Walter's latest demand reverberated in her ears and brightened her mood slightly.

"Asterisk, do you think those young people have any peppermint sticks available?"

Olivia didn't know exactly _when_ she started accepting Peter into all of her interrogations, but he obviously enjoyed it. It was probably just the change of pace from being the one interrogated to the one interrogat_ing_. He'd also picked up some techniques that were, to say the least, quite unique.

"OK, we'll start with introductions." Olivia began. Sheldon stepped forward first. Olivia caught Peter and a couple of Sheldon's friends rolling their eyes.

"I am Dr. Sheldon Cooper, B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D., theoretical physicist."

"Ohh-kay… Umm…" Unsure of how to respond to Dr. Cooper, she just pointed to the next fellow in the row, the one with the glasses.

"Dr. Leonard Hofstadter… I'm an experimental physicist."

She nodded and was about to look to the next man along the row, Rainbow Man, when he suddenly shouted, "I'm ain't tellin' the Feds nothin'!" He crossed his arms over his chest, supposedly on an attempt to look tough or cool. Dr. Hofstader sighed and introduced the remaining two men.

"That's Howard Wolowitz. He's an engineer. And-" he pointed to a slightly stocky Indian man who had been completely silent the entire time, "That's Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali, astrophysicist. We all work at Caltech. The apartment belongs to Sheldon and me." Olivia nodded her thanks and looked to the blonde woman who stood behind the group.

"Oh, I'm Penny. I'm an actress currently waiting at the Cheesecake Factory and I live across the hall in 4B. I'm the one who called the police."

"OK, good… Well I'm Special Agent Olivia Dunham, and this is Peter Bishop. He and his father, Dr. Walter Bishop, are civilian consultants with the FBI. The other woman is Junior Agent Astrid Farnsworth. We're here to investigate your… device and determine its safety. We would appreciate your cooperation."

"Excuse me, but…" It was Dr. Cooper, again. "Is this the same Walter Bishop who was institutionalized in the nineties for manslaughter, deemed unfit for trial?" Peter arched his eyebrow and shifted his weight. Olivia knew he had taken plenty of grief about that in his teen years.

"Yes, but-"

"You sent _him_ to investigate _my_ work? Surely even Wolowitz would be more competent than he would, and he doesn't even have a doctorate!"

"Excuse me, but I have a Master's Degree in enginee-"

"Shut-up, Howard!"

"You do realize you're talking about my father – in front of me…" Peter leaned forward while talking, leading the others to take a monumental step back.

"Oh my gosh, he's gonna kill us!" Leonard exclaimed. All four men flinched as Peter gesticulated.

"OKAY, OKAY, OKAY!" Penny was intervening. She held her hands in the air and moved in front of her neighbors. "Their easily intimidated, and they bruise easily!" the group were suddenly interrupted by a siren from the apartment.

"I knew it! We're all going to die in a terrible fire!" Sheldon had regained his composure and turned to run down the stairs when Leonard grabbed his arm.

"That's not the fire alarm, it's that insane trap you set in the pantry you hid your Flash comic in!"

Astrid chose that moment to stick her head out the door. "Umm, guys? Walter's been snared…"

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><p><strong>AN: Thanks to WeBuiltThePyramids for Betaing for Big Bang Theory  
><strong>

**Please Rate and Review!**


	3. Howard's Paranoia

A/N: It took me far to long to update this and I feel AWFUL about it! :(

I DO NOT OWN THESE AMAZING FEATS OF INTELLIGENCE (You'll see what I did there...).

Anyway, I was trying to add the interrogation onto the end, but I haven't been able to make it work, and the crappiness I had made this chapter unbearably long. Hopefully it won't take too much longer, as this chapter is unbearably short, considering how long it has been since the last one...

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><p>Howard knew something was up. These people, these government agents, they were all just too mysterious; their stories didn't quite match up. This entire affair was forming a vast web of contradictions. And he wasn't paranoid!<p>

To start off, the old man, Walter Bishop, was a mystery in himself. Howard had heard of him, of course. He'd been made an example of throughout the young scientific community: a man of brilliance, confined to working on toothpaste by an overpowering corporation. He'd simply lost it one day and flung himself into the world of quantum and theoretical physics. A fire had started in his lab – the one that killed his assistant- and although he hadn't been prosecuted, he'd been deemed "unfit for trial" and incarcerated in a mental institution. Who knew how he ended up here?

The mad scientist in question was currently sitting quietly on the floor, per the request of his son, while the younger Bishop and two FBI agents attempted to untangle the security net Sheldon had paid Howard to set up around the hiding place of his most valuable comic.

Speaking of the FBI, Agent Olivia Dunham was definitely amazing. If he weren't preoccupied with the important issue of censorship at hand, Howard would've been mooning over her. But she was definitely hiding something. The way she kept skimming the details of the situation was beyond suspicious; and her words seemed very rehearsed, like she had received a script of politically correct terminology and practiced beforehand. The final bit of curiosity brought him to the third person: Agent Dunham definitely had a past with Peter Bishop.

The way they spoke to each other and worked together almost flawlessly displayed that to everyone around them. The group of agents had only been working on untangling the older Bishop for a short time, but they seemed to be only about an hour away from discovering the secret to removing the net, and deciphering one of his traps was definitely a feat of intelligence and teamwork. Even with their apparent chemistry, it was obvious that Agent Dunham and Mr. Bishop were avoiding each other.

And _he_ may have been the most curious. Howard just couldn't shake a feeling of familiarity about the guy. It wasn't the same feeling as knowing about Dr. Bishop. This man had been in Howard's vicinity repeatedly, and something had happened then to bring him to Howard's attention, but, for the life of him, he couldn't put his finger on it! Who was Peter Bishop?

The young agent who had informed everyone of the incident, Astrid Farnsworth, was the first to let her frustration get the best of her, "Who built this crazy thing?" Her exclamation drew Howard from his pondering prematurely.

"Oh, um… that would be me" Howard raised his hand, then held it out to the young woman. "Howard Wolowitz, engineer." He gave a smile that he perceived to be charming and they shook hands awkwardly. Astrid looked slightly frightened, but that was probably because of his awesomeness. It seemed to happen a lot.

Howard strode up to Dr. Bishop and plucked a strand of rope off of the floor to the doctor's right. When he pulled it, a mechanism clicked and the entire net began slowly withdrawing into a box above the pantry. Howard dusted his hands off and moved carefully back to his friends, narrowly avoiding treading on the moving ropes.

"And you didn't think to do that before?" Mr. Bishop asked, perturbed.

"We'll, who wouldn't, Peter?" Dr. Bishop interrupted. "I was trying to inform you of the trigger string, but you commanded me 'sit still'!" Crazy or not, the old man was obviously brilliant.

While the father and son broke out into an argument over the standards of normalcy and public etiquette, Agent Dunham smiled apologetically and led them away from the kitchenette. She began taking Sheldon's statement with much difficulty, and Howard took the opportunity to call Leonard, Raj, and Penny over to him for a conference of sorts. "Listen, these agents getting to be too much. There is something weird going on here!"

Raj leaned over and whispered into Howard's ear, "I think it's a cover up."

"I just said that." When would this guy ever learn to listen? Or talk, for that matter – the whispering was getting a little strange.

"Something is definitely not right with them." Leonard agreed. "We can't just allow them to hide our work from the world! It could change science forever, and our parents would be proud of us!"

"Yeah, the government has no right to censor the people!" The three boys all looked at Penny with slightly surprised expressions on their faces.

"What?" she asked. "One of my friends got arrested from a protest, and when I picked her up from jail, she raved about censorship and animal rights for hours… I guess the meaty horror stories seared the facts into my brain."

"That explanation is anatomically impossible, though mildly comical." Sheldon was back. "The nosy Agent Dunham wants to speak to you, Howard. Although I am unable to fathom what information she could hope to gather."

Sheldon never could drop it, could he? "Listen, I-"

"Mr. Wolowitz?" It was the Agent. "I need to speak with you."

"You'll never make me talk!"

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><p>Thanks for reading! Please review and things, whether or not you want to. I COMMAND YOU!<p> 


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